Audiodescription of Emotions in Films: Accessing Inside-Out from the “Right Side Out”

Abstract

In this paper, we would like to reflect on the choices made in the production of an audio-described script for an animated film. Whoever prepares the script for an audio description must, without doubt, have a profound linguistic knowledge, as well as a great knowledge of the work it describes, its message, its creator and its style, as well as its recipients. This linguistic and documentation training, knowledge of subtitling and the ability to understand the meaning in short periods of time are vital when it comes to transmitting as many stimuli as possible to blind “spectators”. From a pragmatic-cognitive perspective, we want to reflect on the capacity of analysis, interpretation and transmission of non-verbal stimuli in the form of verbal stimuli in an animated film that requires a maximum effort of information compression for the written script. This is the film Inside Out (2015), winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Film. To this end, relevant fragments of the film and the audio description prepared by the National Organization of the Spanish Blind (ONCE) through its mobile application Audesc Mobile are analyzed.